Suit Filed by Farm Worker Underscores Housing Woes : Justice: Badly burned in a Fallbrook shanty, illegal immigrant says employer should be held liable for unsafe living conditions.

Sidronio Sarmiento Rodriguez’s trial by fire began with the dream of $3.35 an hour. Five years ago, he entered the United States, illegally as usual, and made his way back to a Fallbrook strawberry farm that he knew from his years riding the migrant stream.

Like many migrant farmhands slaving from dawn to dusk for minimum wage, Sarmiento lived near the fields--cooking, washing and sleeping in a gully tucked into a parcel of land next to the rows of strawberry plants. His home was no more than a shelter, a 10- by 12-foot shack made of cardboard, wood and plastic scraps scrounged from the farm dumpster.

One night, he fell asleep in the shack to the glow of a candle. Fire erupted, severely burning Sarmiento, leaving his face badly deformed, his hands blistered, his skin rough. The pain of standing up, he would say later, “eats up my flesh.”

Alleging that someone should pay for his pain, Sarmiento sued both the grower and the owner of the land, charging that they were directly responsible for the fire.

So far, he has been markedly unsuccessful in his case, a novel legal test that spotlights the farm-worker housing dilemma plaguing San Diego County, where agriculture is a billion-dollar-a-year business but laborers, mostly Mexican migrants, sleep outside on the ground.

The contrast is especially acute in North County, where avocado groves, strawberry patches and flower fields provide abundance. At night, the migrant labor pool, 10,000 to 15,000 laborers, mostly men, finds shelter in coarse casitas --cardboard, wood and plastic hooches--hidden among the brush, often within sight of prosperous suburban developments.

Sarmiento’s case illustrates the legal barriers that stand in the way of change. He alleges that he essentially was held in servitude in a farm labor camp, beholden to an employer who required him to live nearby and provided materials for a shelter--and who, Sarmiento says, should be held liable for unsafe living conditions.

The employers, a collection of companies tied to San Bernardino-based produce grower John Livacich, deny responsibility for an accident that happened on someone else’s land.

The landowners--an elderly Los Angeles woman, Ruth Garmes, and her two daughters, who have since sold the property--made it plain in legal papers that they could hardly be at fault for a fire that happened to a trespasser.

There is also an underlying practical concern to a case like Sarmiento’s, advocates for migrant workers said last week. There is the fear of a backlash that could further complicate migrants’ housing dilemma--that landowners, fearing liability, might resort to razor wire or guard dogs to make sure migrants stay off their land.

But, migrant rights advocates said, only a favorable ruling in a case like his can bring to bear the pressure that would prompt landowners and growers to provide large-scale, decent housing for the workers.

“Supply and demand is such here, in terms of (the availability of) migrant labor, that employers still don’t have to provide benefits like housing in order to have an adequate work force,” said Claudia Smith, a staff attorney in Oceanside with California Rural Legal Assistance, a farm labor advocacy group. “That is the unfortunate reality.”

A state appeals court was unsympathetic. In a recent ruling, the 4th District Court of Appeal in San Diego threw out the case against the landowners, saying they had no obligation to warn Sarmiento that burning a candle in a makeshift hut could be unsafe or to try to prevent the fire.

The court gave Sarmiento the chance to amend his complaint against the growers but suggested strongly that the case was bound to end up in the workers’ compensation system, a course that would pay Sarmiento’s medical bills but deny him the opportunity for a precedent-setting ruling. The growers deny any civil liability.

Sarmiento filed his new complaint Monday in San Diego Superior Court, and his attorney, San Diego lawyer David Ronquillo, said he remains convinced the legal system will ultimately do right by his client. The suit involves claims of negligence and emotional distress, among others.

In the meantime, Ronquillo said, referring to the plight of migrant farmhands, “It is an absolute travesty what is happening to these people. It is awful.”

The new complaint paints a picture of exploitation.

The suit alleges that the working and living conditions of the field hands were manipulated by the growers, who controlled access to and from the fields, provided the workers with scrap building materials and demanded they live nearby.

According to the suit, the growers “required” Sarmiento to live “at or near the farm,” located at Gum Tree and Stage Coach lanes in Fallbrook, so he would “be available at a moment’s notice to work the (strawberry) crops.”

Sarmiento had worked the strawberry fields for years. At other times, he had also been a busboy at a Chinese restaurant. Seeking escape from the grinding poverty in his village in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca, where he had finished sixth grade, he had been coming north since 1979, the summer he turned 17.

Sarmiento returned to the strawberry farm in January, 1987, when he was 24. He and other migrants were pointed to the trash for scrap wood, cardboard and plastic, according to legal papers filed in the case.

This, Sarmiento said in a statement he gave under oath, was a drill he knew well. It took him and three friends about a day to build the casita where they would sleep. They built a separate cooking shack a few yards away.

Both shacks were deliberately put up in a canyon a few hundred yards from the fields, on property well-known to vendors and caterers and believed by neighbors to be part of the farm, according to legal papers filed in the case. In fact, the canyon was on property adjoining the 80-acre farm, a 20-acre parcel then owned by Garmes and her daughters.

The migrants also considered the Garmes property part of the farm, though in places there was a fence marking the property line and a few “no trespassing” signs posted, according to the court papers.

Garmes and her daughters, who had let the land lie fallow and made only a couple of trips each year to Fallbrook, knew nothing about the shacks or the related activity, the court papers indicate. The growers, the suit alleges, knew Sarmiento was living in “unhealthy squalor,” without heat, running water or “other basic human necessities.”

Though the growers knew that it could be dangerous to live under such conditions, the suit said, neither the owners nor the field foreman did anything to discourage the building of the hooches because it was to their economic advantage to keep the arrangement that way.

Besides keeping migrants nearby, according to migrant advocates, the casita system saves growers the expense of building housing for their laborers and the hassle of state and federal inspection for those dwellings.

It also, advocates charge, isolates migrants from their prospering neighbors in the booming suburbs around the fields.

“They are living out there in the open air and yet everybody is against them,” said Father Michael Diehl, widely known as Padre Miguel, a North County priest who ministers to the migrants. “. . . They are poor. They are strangers. They are Mexican. There are rich people all around (the migrants), and they hate them.”

Area farm representatives blame the living conditions of migrant farmhands on the general lack of affordable housing.

“The bottom line is that these people are homeless,” said Dave Owen, spokesman for the San Diego County Farm Bureau, representing the area’s expanding agriculture industry. Crop value climbed 9% in 1991, to $1.017 billion, placing San Diego County among the top 30 agricultural counties in the nation, according to county officials.

“Why are they homeless? They can’t afford the housing,” Owen said. “They are rural homeless.”

In a relatively urban county such as San Diego, Owen said, where apartment houses in towns near the fields beckon laborers, the agriculture industry has little moral imperative to provide housing for its workers.

“Safeway doesn’t do it,” Owen said. “General Dynamics doesn’t do it. . . . Why should the farmer in the urban setting?”

Because, according to legal briefs filed on Sarmiento’s behalf, meager wages leave the farmhand little choice but on-site housing. Sarmiento grossed $580 for his work in January and February, 1987. His net pay was $542, according to court papers.

As many as 50 to 80 workers employed by the farm lived in nearby gullies and canyons, the court papers said.

The day before the fire, Feb. 8, 1987, was Sunday, a day off, and Sarmiento spent it playing soccer with other migrants on a clearing also on the Garmes property.

That night, Sarmiento said, he had about one-fourth of a “medium” bottle of liquor. He fell asleep with a candle lit. He was the only one in the casita .

The next thing he knew, he said, he woke up to fire--his pants, shirt, socks and hair ablaze.

Sarmiento said he dragged himself out of the shack and rolled around in the dirt to put the fire out. He screamed for help and remembers nothing about the next several days, he said.

He was burned over 55% of his body, according to the court files.

Sarmiento spent the next two months in the hospital, got out and filed suit about a year later.

Nearly two years after that, in April, 1990, on the first day of trial, San Diego Superior Court Judge Ross Tharp dismissed the case, saying Sarmiento’s attorneys deserved an “A-plus for ingenuity” but declaring that the case involved a “social problem that the government should deal with, not (the grower) and the landowner.”

A few weeks ago, the 4th District court upheld most of that ruling. As for Garmes and her daughters, there was no evidence they contributed in any way to the fire, the court said, dismissing any charges against them.

“No question they are terrible injuries,” Ruth Garmes’ lawyer, Los Angeles attorney Everett Meiners, said of Sarmiento’s burns. “You don’t want to see anybody have those. But when you go to assign responsibility for that injury, I don’t see the basis for claiming that the landowners have some responsibility to protect this individual from himself.”

As for the growers, the court said, one of the basic rules of the workers’ compensation system is that it provides the sole recourse for an employee injured on site, even if the injury occurs when the employee is not working.

If, the court said, Sarmiento was in fact required to live on the premises, then his only option is workers’ compensation. But the appeal court said he deserved at least the chance to try to show some other facts proving civil liability, if he could, in Superior Court.

“Our position is simple,” said David B. Oberholtzer, the San Diego lawyer for the growers. “Workers’ comp will provide for the surgery this guy needs. It will give him a pension for his life. It is his best hope for leading as good a life as he can. We don’t understand why he has refused to accept that option.”

Ronquillo, Sarmiento’s attorney, declined to comment about the merits of the case.

Sarmiento, who is married, is living north of the border with his wife and two of their four children. The other two are in Mexico.

Sarmiento could not be reached for comment. It is unclear what kind of work his wife, who used to have a job at a Laundromat, is doing. The family, Ronquillo said, is barely making it, existing “hand to mouth.”